Verizon High Speed Wireless

TheSync writes: "Wired News has an article about Verizon's surprise announcement of "Express Network," a wireless data service with a speed of 144 kbps. Handsets to support the service could be sold as early as next week, and Emblaze Systems is already testing wireless video on Verizon's Philadelphia network." I'm sure it will work just as well as Verizon's cell service does now.

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First bit of "3G" cellular

[isdnip]

What VeriZontal Wireless is introducing is the so-called "1XRTT" form of CDMA2000, which is one of the flavors of "third generation" (3G) cellular telephony. While there has been a lot of noise about 3G around the world, and European carriers have shelled out tens of billions of licenses (dotcom-style investment) for new 3G spectrum (putting them deeply into debt), VeriZontal Wireless and Sprint PCS are instead taking the "just do it" approach.

There are two distinct technical flavors (air interfaces) to 3G, both based on CDMA. The GSM (most of world) and IS-136-TDMA (Cingular, ATT-W) carriers, with existing TDMA networks, are migrating to WCDMA. The CDMA carriers (Sprint, VZW, Korea) are migrating to CDMA2000. (Qualcomm favors CDMA2000, but makes patent royalties off of both. They really did invent it.) The CDMA2000 spec in turn has multiple variants. The "1XRTT" flavor is simply a software change to the way existing CDMAone carriers are allocated among calls. The peak speed is only 144 kbps (ten times what CDMA one gives you) but there's no forklift upgrade, and no new spectrum needed. Of course it needs new handsets to make use of the new features, but the base stations are backwards compatible. Very graceful, 3G on the cheap.

So VZW and Sprint are both rolling out 1XRTT this year. VZW announced faster, but they're both gated, in practice, by the availability of handsets and similar remote devices from the (mostly Korean) makers. The CDMA and GSM carriers are instead phasing in a "2 1/2G" technology, EDGE, as a sort of bridge to WCDMA. They'll need separate networks, or a forklift upgrade, to do 3G. Since WCDMA doesn't share spectrum with TDMA, they can't do the easy phase-in that CDMA gives you.

But don't think of 3G as a substitute for fast wireline. A 144 kbps call basically eats ten voice calls' worth of network bandwidth. So it will be expensive! Packetized data, by the byte, will be cheaper, but really aimed more at low-bandwidth things like email than high-bandwidth things like music or ordinary web browsing. (Look up EDGE pricing on the GSM networks to get an idea; it's in dollars/MB). This is a premium service for users who need it.

Re:info

[Smitty825]

Although I don't live in that area, it doesn't suprise me that they are using the term "1x" What they are actually referring to is "CDMA 2000-1XEV". The "EV" stands for "Enhanced Voice". It has a maximum data capability of 144kbps.

For all of the posters that have requested higher data-rates; don't worry, it's coming:

WCDMA: Wideband CDMA. It wil start to appear in Europe and some US networks later this year (IIRC). It will have a maximum data rate of 384Kbps (IIRC). However, it uses almost 5MHz of the spectrum (~2.5 forward link + ~2.5 on the reverse link)

1X-EV+DO: The add-on to the CDMA standard should allow data rates of between 1 & 2 Mbps. It's commonly reffered to as High Data Rate (HDR) and could appear late this year or sometime next year.

1xDV: This probably won't be out until 2003-2004 timeframe, but it should offer enhanced voice and data speeds. I don't think that the spec is totally finalized, but it could provide data speeds up to 10Mbps.